


Sins of the Father

by volti



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: AU, American Sign Language, Friendship, Mute Frisk, Night Terrors, Nonbinary Character, Other, Post-Pacifist Route, Queerplatonic Relationships, or maybe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-22
Updated: 2015-11-22
Packaged: 2018-05-02 19:28:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5260811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/volti/pseuds/volti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Asriel Dreemurr makes it above ground and grows up alongside Frisk—at the cost of his father's life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sins of the Father

**Author's Note:**

> !!! An Undertale fic! I'm in love with this game, and especially in love with Asriel's character. I think a lot of us wanted to save him, and this is the best I could come up with.
> 
> Also inspired by [paychiri's](http://paychiri.tumblr.com/tagged/grown%20up%20au) art of Frisk and Asriel as teenagers. Go check it out! It's wonderful and dragged me into this hell in the first place.
> 
> Comments and kudos welcome c: !

Asriel told Frisk once, in the moments leading up to sleep, that they weren’t his sibling.

They were children then, huddled under the blankets of their respective beds, and above ground. Again for them, brand new for him. It seemed like everything was brand new for him, or like he was stepping onto fresh ground after being away for so long. Too long. All he could cling to was the locket hanging from his neck. _Best friends forever on the front._ A crudely-scratched X on the back. The least Frisk could do for him, they thought.

More specifically, he’d said, “You’re not them.” Frisk couldn’t tell if the knot in his brow was anger, or hatred, or a simple self-reminder that weighed too heavily in his heart. They weren’t his family. They weren’t Chara. Never could be. Their only reply was a closed fist, drawing a circle over their chest. 

Asriel shook his head; if he could have sunk into the bed, Frisk would bet whatever money they had that he would have. “You don’t have to apologize.” And then, with a faint smile, “Maybe it’s better that you’re not.”

Even if Frisk could think of what to say in the moment, nothing would have come out; there was a knock at the bedroom door, and there was Toriel, standing in the hallway with a gentle smile and her finger on the light switch. She never had to open her mouth; she could always say whatever she needed to with her eyes.

Before Toriel turned out the lights, Frisk made one last sign, a question. Joined circles made of thumbs and indexes, fingers spread out, palms moving from front to back, accentuated with a frown and a tilt of the head. 

_Family?_

Asriel only shrugged and slunk under the covers with his back to them, but Toriel dignified them with an answer; the same sign they had made, graceful in spite of fur and larger hands. _Family._ A few more signs— _would you like to sit with me for a while?_ —and Frisk spared one last glance across the room before they slid out of bed and reached for her hand.

Toriel was as gentle as Frisk remembered, perhaps even more so. How anyone, man or monster, could have her unending patience was beyond them. But she spoke softly, and squeezed their hand once the door was closed and they were downstairs. Frisk rarely came downstairs at night when the lights were still on, and they often wondered what could possibly keep Toriel up so late. But Toriel spoke in hushed tones, and they barely had time to notice the books, the reading glasses, and the half-eaten slice of snail pie stacked beside the coffee table.

“I am sure that this has all been… hard on him,” she admitted as Frisk scrambled onto the couch and hugged one of the cushions to their chest. “It isn’t every day that you lose a soul and gain one again. Impossible, it would have seemed before now. Or so we thought.”

Frisk rested their chin on the cushion and blinked up at her. No one spoke about this, at least not during the day. There was always something about adults and secrets and the night that they never quite understood, why stories and talks like this only came out once the sun went down. But maybe it was best this way, when Asriel only had to deal with the stresses of sleep and not the stresses of everyone talking around him.

Maybe that was why. Because people only ever talked around Asriel back then.

“I do not think…” Toriel began before she paused with a bitter smile. Thoughtful, never for dramatic effect—that was for television, that was for Mettaton. “I do not think I need to remind you of what has happened. Not when you’ve seen it for yourself.”

Of course she didn’t. They’d all seen it underground. The crack in the barrier, the release of every soul. The only thing they hadn’t seen was whatever bargain Asgore had made. Whatever had gone on in his head for them to find him, collapsed and unmoving, on the ground before them. For them to find Asriel, still standing, still breathing, alive.

“It was quite the sacrifice,” Toriel murmured, opening her arms for Frisk to climb into her lap, “and I would not be surprised if Asriel were still feeling the effects himself. It’s rather unusual for something like this to happen.” She scratched her chin and looked to the side, balancing her glasses on her nose and sliding a book onto the armrest of the couch. “I suppose that is the kind of power that one human soul has to offer, let alone six.”

She was silent for a moment, flipping through pages of facts; if Frisk pressed their ear to her chest, they could hear her heart still. It was strange, how things could feel so familiar and unsettling at the same time. How this could feel like home, with a fireplace and soft lighting and polished furniture, when there was something looming upstairs? A feeling, or a thought, or whatever any of them would have to cope with?

They spread their fingers, touched the tip of their thumb to their chin. _Mother._

Toriel smiled, and pulled them closer; her fur was warm, and tickled their cheek. “Yes, my child.”

A few more signs, and Frisk tucked their knees in. _How do you feel? You._

Toriel fell silent, and her smile faltered, and her grip slackened, and the room felt a little colder, if rooms could do that so quickly. “I? Well…” She closed her book, pushed it aside, turned Frisk in her lap so they were staring at one another head-on. “Only part of this is about how I feel, after all. Shouldn’t Asriel’s feelings weigh much more? After all, he is—” She stopped then, with a nervous laugh. “I suppose you deserve a straightforward answer, do you not?”

She stopped again, just as thoughtful as before; sometimes Frisk saw flickers of a teacher in her, sometimes flickers of a mother. “I am happy to have gained two children,” she finally said, and Frisk could almost feel an _again_ hanging in the space between them. “One is blessing enough; two is a fortune I could never have dreamed of.”

Their fingers moved swiftly after a moment, signing the letters of a new name, along with a question mark. _A-S-G-O-R-E-?_

Maybe it wasn’t best to mention him, by name or otherwise, because Toriel’s smile faded, and her eyes almost hardened. Frisk could almost feel her tense. “I cannot speak of him, or for him. He has made his decision. I have made mine.” She softened again, the way Frisk was used to, getting used to. “I have children to raise, after all. To teach.”

Their heart swelled, and they touched their thumb to their chin again. _Mother._

Toriel picked them up with one arm, patted the air with her free hand, spread her fingers in front of her face and closed them as she drew them to her lips. _Child. Sleep._

Frisk nodded, and pressed their ear to her chest again. Sleep. Sleep wouldn’t solve everything, but it could solve some things, and maybe Asriel would talk more in the morning.

\---

Asriel didn’t talk more in the morning. He screamed in the middle of the night instead.

He woke them, probably hadn’t meant to, at a time they weren’t used to being awake. Maybe one, maybe two in the morning; they couldn’t read the analog clock on their shared nightstand in all this dark. But Asriel was thrashing under the blankets, sitting bolt upright, shaking his head, panting, as if he were really awake from some terrible nightmare. Inconsolable. Scared.

It had only happened a couple of times before, and immediately after Asriel woke up from them, he’d mumbled about faces and colors and images Frisk couldn’t really identify. Toriel had called those moments “sleep terrors,” said that was what Dr. Alphys called them. “I’m not the right kind of doctor for this,” Alphys had said during an afternoon visit, “but I know what they are.” She’d opened up a practice downtown, to run whatever experiments she could, for the good of whatever species she could manage. She said it was easy, once she started working for herself.

Frisk wondered if Alphys knew because she’d had them too. Long ago. Or maybe now, in spite of everything. If she had them because sleep is the one place you can’t run away from anything, even when you’ve sworn to face it head-on. And then they wondered if Undyne was comfort enough, what she would do to help. She’d blushed some obscene shade of purple when they asked, once, how she and Alphys went to bed together, as though there was some shame in going to bed at all. But then Undyne said something along the lines of, “I hold her hand sometimes. Really calms her down.” She snorted, stifled a laugh. “Or gets her going.”

Sometimes Frisk wondered if Undyne only smiled and told jokes like that because it was easier that way. Because jokes made it easy to forget what you lost beyond your control.

But they didn’t think Asriel could get much more going now, or that it was the time for any kind of laughing, and their stomach lurched at the thought of what else he might do. Swallowing hard, they slid out of bed, shuffled across the room, and reached for Asriel’s hand. What else could they do?

 _Really calms her down,_ Undyne had said, but they couldn’t even tell if Asriel could be calmed down now, or if it would only make him worse. They held anyway, for the positives, for the _what-if-he-gets-better._ His fur was soaked, here with sweat, there with tears, and even when he stilled and opened his eyes wide, when Toriel burst into the room in her gown and nightcap, they were still holding on.

Frisk met her eyes without a word, without a sign, and gave Asriel’s hand a squeeze. Maybe they weren’t family, not in his eyes, but they were here, they were living, and Frisk couldn’t conceive a universe or timeline where he deserved life at a cost none of them really understood. They spoke instead with the drag of their fingertips across the palm of Asriel’s hand, until he stilled and settled against the pillows and didn’t stop crying.

“Yellow,” he murmured in between hiccups, rubbed at his eyes and picked at the stripes in his pajamas. “Yellow.”

Before this it was green; before that, orange. Frisk only had a vague idea of what the colors were, but they decided to wait for him to explain, whenever he felt he could. Instead they shared another look with Toriel, who was edging toward the bed to scoop him up in her arms. “Rest, Asriel,” she hummed, and every time she spoke his name it was like she couldn’t believe she could say it again. “Rest.”

And Asriel whimpered about colors and faces again, while she rocked him back and forth, until he asked to be put down again. And if there was anything he deserved, really deserved, it was this. Warmth, an embrace, a family, to be surrounded by life instead of dust and flowers and the gritty vengeance they thought he never wanted. He deserved this.

When Toriel put him down again, and before she stepped out of the bedroom, she made sure to plug in the nightlight that lay abandoned by the outlet. Without a sound, Frisk lifted their head to look at him, fists loosely clenched, not knowing if they should reach for him again.

“Told you I was a crybaby,” he rasped, dragging his hand over his eyes. “They knew that. Now you do, too.”

Frisk frowned, and signed a name by the glow of the nightlight.

He nodded. “But you’re not them.”

Frisk shook their head and lifted their hands to speak. _They were your family. I’m not your family. I’m not your sibling._ When Asriel didn’t say anything, they crooked their index fingers, hooked them together one way, then the other. _Friends._

“Friends,” Asriel repeated under his breath, and with shaking hands he mirrored their movements.

\---

There was a copy of a book called _The Secret Garden_ stowed away in Toriel’s bookshelf; it was only a children’s version, but Frisk and Asriel would pore over the book together for weeks at a time. Asriel would read aloud, about the orphan Mary and her cousin Colin and the twisted weeds of the gardens they imagined, until both of them very nearly had the story memorized from cover to cover, and they would play at characters in the backyard after school. “I’ll be Colin Craven,” Asriel said, “and you can be Mary.”

 _But I’m not a girl,_ Frisk replied. _And we’re not family._

Asriel shrugged. “Well, you can’t be Dickon either, because he’s a boy, and you’re not a boy, either.”

 _Then you can be Asriel,_ Frisk said with a half-smile, _and I’ll be Frisk._

It was better that way, anyway. Asriel told better stories, and his eyes always lit up more than Colin’s ever could. And he was honest. He didn’t pretend to be more sick than he was, or didn’t believe so. It was quite the opposite, in fact, despite the increasing visits to Alphys’s office downtown. The night terrors weren’t getting worse, but they weren’t getting better; Frisk still woke up to screaming and shaking some nights. And in spite of the medical parts of it all, who else could any of them turn to about sciences and the affairs of monsters and souls?

Alphys ran tests from inside and out, sometimes asking questions about how he slept, sometimes taping wires to the top of his head, always too focused on monitors and graphs and the way her chair rolled under her weight. And Asriel would pretend not to be scared, pretend he was as big as his father—maybe it was easy to, with all of that living inside him—but his eyes betrayed more than he was probably aware of. Frisk never mentioned it; holding his hand through all the questions and all the procedures was enough for them both.

The only questions he refused to answer were the ones about the terrors, about the visions. All anyone could discern was from what he said upon waking. The names of colors. Faces. Apologies. That was the only time Frisk ever saw any of Colin Craven in him—sick and stubborn and silent. And they couldn’t be Mary, because they couldn’t push him. They couldn’t call it nonsense. It was too real to be nonsense. Most days Asriel thanked them for that with a squeeze of the hand on the way out of Alphys’s office, and sneaking a spoonful of their vegetables, or whatever concoction Papyrus had brought over on his daily lap around the town, onto his plate at supper.

“You don’t think I’m a crybaby, do you, Frisk?” he asked them once in the middle of the night, when they were hiding under the covers of his bed. He promised he’d try to sleep without the nightlight this time, but he was still trembling beside them, as if already afraid of what could happen. He said it like he already knew the answer, surprised at what he’d found. “They used to, but you don’t, do you?”

Frisk shook their head and scooted closer.

“You don’t think it’s bad that I’m scared sometimes?” He paused. “A lot of the time?”

Again, they shook their head.

“Why?”

It was too dark for Asriel to see their hands, so they rested his palms against their knuckles and signed slowly.

_Because we’re kids. We’re supposed to be scared._

\---

“I’ll tell you,” he finally said one night over pie, with _The Secret Garden_ propped up against his knees. “What I see when I sleep. I couldn’t see them at first, or maybe I could but I just couldn’t remember them. But I can now. They’re like flashes.” Toriel couldn’t hear them from the kitchen anyway, not over the clink of ceramic and silverware, the creaks of the oven door, the rush of water from the kitchen sink.

Frisk moved closer anyway with a hand cupped around their ear. Because they were kids, and they were friends, and they were supposed to guard secrets with their life. Especially secrets Asriel had kept to himself for months.

Despite the noises in the kitchen, Asriel’s voice dropped to just above a whisper. “Children,” he said. “I see children. And their souls have colors, and I see them…” He choked on his words for a moment. “I see them die. I see their souls and how long they last, I hold them in my hands. And I keep saying sorry, and I keep wanting to save them, and I _can’t._ And I think… I think he’s trying to make me see them”—he patted his chest—“in here. That’s how come I can remember them.” He started to shake again; the book toppled from his knees, and Frisk placed it aside and touched his hand to still him, keep him with them. “They feel like hearts, Frisk. Real, living hearts.”

Hearts. They’d seen their own plenty of times, somehow. In the back of their mind, they supposed, when they were underground and fighting to get out, barely fighting at all. In some twisted science, or fantasy, or reality. For a fleeting moment, Frisk pressed their open palm to their chest, felt the pulse of their blood against their fingertips. Maybe it felt more real to him, seeing these hearts outside of bodies and still alive—frighteningly, even to Frisk. They’d never seen a real heart before. They didn’t think they wanted to.

“Sorry,” Asriel mumbled when he noticed them squirming. “Maybe that was too much.”

Frisk’s first instinct was to shake their head, but if Asriel was going to be honest, then they probably owed him the same courtesy. They wiggled a hand in front of their chest, as if to say, _maybe a little._ But his shoulders slackened all the same, like he was glad to finally say it—even more so when Frisk sat up on their knees and gingerly laced their arms around his neck.

Asriel laughed. And cried. Quietly, but Frisk could feel the tears seeping into their shirt. “I remember the first time you did this,” he said, pressing his forehead against their shoulder. “When I thought I wasn’t really me, even though Dad…”

They nodded, and rubbed circles into his back the way they had before. If they closed their eyes, they could feel Asriel holding them just a little tighter.

“I know I have to tell Dr. Alphys,” he whispered. “I know she might be able to help.” Helping was all Alphys tried to do now, anyway, and Frisk never had the heart to tell him what she’d been responsible for in the first place. “But I’m scared.” He laughed, once, half-heartedly. “I’m a kid, and I’m scared.”

 _I know,_ Frisk replied without lips or hands. _I know._

It took a few weeks, pep talks in the mirror, knocking knees, and more squeezes of the hand. But Asriel finally stumbled into Alphys’s office, with his hands clenched into tight fists and Frisk and Toriel in tow, and said, “I have to tell you what I see at night.”

Alphys told Toriel later, in between mouthfuls of instant noodle, that it was as bad as she’d theorized, maybe even worse. Frisk and Asriel strained to listen from one room over, for all of Undyne’s attempts to distract (and maybe benchpress) them, and for everything they already knew. That as much as Asgore’s soul thrived on inside Asriel, she said, so did his personality. So did his memories. That that was what Asriel was seeing, after all. Every last battle, every detail that had etched itself into Asgore’s mind. There it was, in someone as impressionable as his own son.

“Hasn’t he suffered enough?” It was almost too quiet for either of them to hear, but that was what Alphys said.

Even quieter than that was Toriel. “He should not have suffered at all.”

\---

Growing helped. It didn’t cure everything, but it helped.

The terrors, and the visits to Alphys, faded with time, only lived as an ongoing anxiety under Asriel’s skin when he and Frisk grew into their bodies, in separate bedrooms. Asriel spent his mornings rubbing at the horns that were starting to sprout from the top of his head, and Frisk was still barely big enough for Sans’s old parka, even if the occasional stray feather tickled their nose. Maybe that was just one more sign that it belonged to him—he always had to have the last, comical word, except when he sacrificed that word to Toriel.

Every morning, they signed the same question with a mop of brown hair tumbling into their eyes. _Sleep okay?_

Most mornings—eight out of ten, Frisk estimated—Asriel’s answer was a nod, a smile, and an arm around their shoulders as he led the way down to breakfast. When it wasn’t, he only shrugged and rubbed his eyes, or clutched at the locket, and Frisk took the lead instead.

Growing was easier like this, as friends, as homes to one another. They read the real _Secret Garden,_ with all its older implications and the child’s story it somehow managed to retain. They passed notes in school, studied together, went to human/monster conferences together, tousled each other’s hair, exchanged secrets behind the couch once Toriel had decided they were old enough to stay home on their own. Sometimes Asriel pulled the hood of their parka over their head; sometimes Frisk retaliated with a gentle tug on the locket. They said good night with golden flower tea, signs of the hand, and hugs that lasted a little too long, especially after he told them he still saw those children, still heard the apologies, the rumble of his father’s voice at the back of his head: _please do this for me, for my son._

 _You scared?_ Frisk still asked him sometimes.

Asriel shrugged and smiled, at thirteen and fourteen and fifteen. “A little. I don’t see why I’m not allowed to be.” He prodded the tip of their nose with a finger, the way they sometimes used to do to him as children. “You taught me that, didn’t you? Big kids cry, and all.”

Frisk’s heart swelled, and they tried (and failed) to hide it with a nod and a tight-lipped smile.

Asriel told them that they weren’t really terrors anymore, only nightmares that unsettled him at one or two in the morning. It was easier to cope with now, he said, when the images weren’t so vivid, didn’t make him scream. He could simply wind up a music box, or turn on the small white noise machine at his bedside, and drift back to sleep with only a pulse or two of adrenaline in his veins and his fingers closed around the locket. He said he wondered if, somewhere inside of him, his father started to feel like he’d pushed too much. Like keeping him from forgetting was doing more harm than good, as if he had any control over it in the first place.

“Souls are weird,” he finally said, only half joking. “Let’s just go to sleep.”

It was fine like that, for years. It was fine until they were seventeen, and Asriel was at their door again.

“Frisk. _Frisk._ ” A knock at the door, two, three. “Frisk, wake up, please wake up.” 

Two in the morning. Nothing good happened at two in the morning.

They managed to push themselves out of bed, bleary-eyed and barely there; it wasn’t until they opened their bedroom door that they forced themselves awake.

“I saw something,” Asriel said, and for a moment, it was like they were nine again, maybe in the worst way. “I was sleeping, and I saw something.”

 _Children?_ Frisk signed with half-lidded eyes.

“No.” He sounded too hushed, like if he said anything more he would be abducted by some power beyond them. “ _Them._ I saw _them._ And I don’t think… I don’t think I wanted to. I don’t want to anymore. I don’t want them anymore.”

Without a word, Frisk opened their door a little wider to let him in, and he sat huddled at the foot of their bed, rocking back and forth. He’d never seen them like that before, he said. He saw them like how they really _were,_ he said. Laughing off things like poison and murder, pressure he thought was all right to give in to, to feel bigger. Reincarnation. Destruction. Emptiness. Blood. Laughter, _laughter,_ slow and crawling under his claws, and he said he could still hear it, he didn’t want to hear it, he just missed them. Or no, maybe he didn’t miss them. Maybe he just missed who he thought they were. He spoke so quickly, so shakily, it was hard for Frisk to catch up.

“Hold my hand,” he finally said, and his voice cracked. “Like you used to, Frisk.”

They did, and opened up their blankets for him to crawl into bed. They did, and they were there, and Asriel stopped shaking. And so did Frisk.

\---

“D’you think you could come somewhere with me?” Asriel asked the next afternoon, scuffing his heel against the floor and looking around the kitchen. “There’s something I have to do, and I think you have to be there for it.”

As tired as Frisk was from a meeting at the embassy, they agreed. If Asriel was treating them to something, they weren’t going to pass it up. Unless it was snails again. They’d pass up snails any day. A change of clothes, a splash of water to the face, and they were off, arm in arm.

“I found this place I think we’ll like,” Asriel said, passing Alphys’s office, passing the school, passing the gym where Undyne practically lived, passing the new fast food place Sans frequented, until they came upon a park tucked away near the harbor. Maybe Frisk had seen it before; if they had, they couldn’t have spared it more than a passing glance. Because there was no way they could have missed the bed of golden flowers before them, or the rush of water underneath sturdy railings. Like some kind of oasis. For a brief moment, they thought maybe he’d planted these flowers himself.

“I wanted to apologize,” he mumbled. “For unloading so much on you all this time. You didn’t have to do that. And…” He sighed. “And maybe you deserved a better friend than me. Right? I’m a little right, aren’t I?”

Frisk only stared. What was so right about that?

“So I’m taking back”—he managed a smile—“everything. Me. For us, right?”

He reached out a hand to them, closed his fingers around theirs, and led them to the railing, until all they could hear was the lap of the water against the columns, and Asriel’s breathing, and the jingle of a metal chain. And then their hand was in his again, and they felt their hand brush against something cold and solid.

Frisk turned to look at him, and then down at his chest; their hands were enclosed around the locket.

Asriel yanked, and the chain broke and rippled over their hands. He cracked, and the locket was broken into two jagged pieces. He turned Frisk’s palm upward, and pressed one of the pieces into it, hard enough that it threatened to break skin.

“On three,” he murmured, and reeled his arm backward.

They looked down at the piece in their hand, noticed it had already drawn a bit of blood. Their fingers coiled around it, and they nodded. _On three._

This was for them.

Asriel yelled, and the pieces and the chains went flying, and neither of them cared to listen to the final _plop_ as they sank. He turned to them, settled in the flowerbed, and smiled, patting the open space next to him.

“It’s me,” he said, with open arms. “Your best friend.”

Tight lips couldn’t hide the lump in Frisk’s throat, or the tears that welled in their eyes against their will. They dropped to their knees, in spite of the dirt and grass stains on their jeans, and reached for his hands again. None of that dramatic throwing-the-arms-around-the-neck. That was for television. That was for Mettaton. But they weren’t, and neither were their backs against the flowers or their faces turned toward the sun.

 _What about Asgore?_ Frisk signed cautiously, pointing to his chest.

Asriel managed an earnest smile and propped himself up onto one elbow. “Wasn’t Dad always part of me anyway?”

He was right about that.

“And anyway,” he went on, “I think… it _feels_ like he’s been… fading. Like he trusts that I’ll remember him. Or what needs to be remembered. I don’t think there’s really a good way to feel someone you love fade away, but I think. I think he’s doing it for the best now. Letting me grow out of this. Letting me be me. I think he would have wanted that anyway. I think all this time he’s just… been trying to say sorry.” He shrugged. “He did that a lot.”

In the moments before Frisk edged closer to hug him—to let him hold them, they corrected themselves—they thought, now more than ever, regardless of everything, that he took after both of his parents somehow. Gentle heart, gentle smile, an affinity for the same tea and the same snails that they still turned their nose up at. (He fought back, wrinkling his nose at the smell of cinnamon or butterscotch, or both.) They’d never hugged Asgore before, only spoken—only fought, once upon a time—but maybe a hug from him could have felt like this. Safe. Dreamlike.

Maybe this was an apology from Asgore too, somehow. Or maybe it was only Asriel all along. Like he wanted. They shut their eyes tightly and pressed their ear to the beat of his heart instead of looking for answers that were probably never meant to be found; they didn’t want to think anymore.

“Remember when we were kids and I told you I didn’t want to let go?” Asriel said with a hollow laugh. Their legs tangled together; Frisk didn’t care. 

Frisk nodded, and Asriel tucked their head under his chin.

“You don’t want to let go either, now, do you?”

They shook their head, and pulled him closer.

Never.


End file.
